Food and Travel in Thailand
A Culinary Explorer's Adventure
In Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, I found almost all of the food to be extra special and more than affordable in restaurants and street markets. Although I didn't cook for myself there, I did spend an inordinate amount of time in the fresh produce and night food markets -- exuberantly fascinated and often visibly discombobulated, to the great amusement of the vendors and shoppers.
After traversing every aisle of food carts and woks on my mission to find the freshest, most interesting and tasty-looking dishes, I was often met with earnestly shaking heads or "No, you don't want that - that's Thai food" by English speaking cooks or bystanders when I pointed and gestured and tried to ask for a meal I knew I truly wanted. On my first such adventure, I did not know that the custom was for the cook to show the ladel with the amount of the garlic and chili for you to indicate how much you wanted: thinking she was simply asking if I wanted those Thai ingredients, I nodded vigorously at the heaped display, and in it all went! Yes, it was Thai food, and I enjoyed every sizzling touch to my lips under the watchful, laughing eyes of the vendors and bystanders who had gathered.
I spent as much time learning about, admiring and experiencing the food as I did with major tourist attractions, often spending hours strolling through streets and markets taking in the sights and smells and sounds: quiet clucking rising up from a heap of vibrantly coloured roosters or hens tied together at the feet - a Thai rooster's plummage is extraordinarily beautiful; plastic tubs and buckets just full enough of murky grey water to keep the fish, frogs or turtles alive until a sale was clinched; mounds and mounds of green and red, and purple and orange; the pleasant stench of durian and jackfruit - pleasant because I was just so thrilled and in awe of it all!
I tried deep-fried grasshoppers at a carnival in Kanchanaburi during a sound and light show of "The Bridge On The River Kwai" that ended with a fabulous fireworks display recreating the Allied bombing campaign that destroyed the bridges of the Death Railway in 1945. I tried a few tiny roasted wood worms offered by a very thin host in a northern hill-tribe village near the Myanmar border, and feared that I was eating his family out of house and home. I discovered countless traditional dishes and savoured authentic versions of some I had had in Toronto's newly arrived Thai restaurants, and watched their creation so that I could try to replicate them when I got home and got a kitchen again. My kitchen is now well-stocked with all those Thai ingredients, (save the grasshoppers and worms), cooking utensils, cookbooks and recipes.
...more about Thai Food
...Popular Thai Dishes and Food Terms
...Return to the Recipe for Travel soon for more adventures in Thailand
